The Shortest Distance Between Two Women (3 page)

Emma suddenly wishes she was back in her kitchen reeling
from Samuel’s phone call. Joyce’s question makes Samuel’s question almost seem easy. Her sky blue Scandinavian eyes close for a moment and she wishes she were a little girl again, innocent, smiling at the world, laughing with her sisters, oblivious to the chaos that her mother must surely have already been creating.

“Well?” Joyce asks again, leaning forward so that she can almost see beyond the tangled mass of hair that Emma has hidden behind most of her life. “Help me out here, Emma darling.”

Emma would love to bend just an inch or so to the left, flick her dirt-stained hair over her left shoulder, smile like a prom queen and then grab her favorite gardening shovel and whack Joyce Maleny, the town gossip, and bearer of all bad and rarely good news, upside the head just hard enough to scare the living hell out of her and make her never want to come anywhere near her beloved gardens again.

This, however, is not how Emma Gilford deals with adversity, interruptions, rudeness or anything else that interferes with her plans, progress or practiced poise. Emma is
nice
. People tell her this all of the time. They apparently expect a certain level of behavior from her. Sending the local gossip who is arguably a pain in the rear end but an apparently viable part of society to the hospital with a gash on her head the size of a shovel is probably not a nice act.

When Emma rises, pushes her hair behind her ears, and sets down her tight leather gloves that she orders from a specialty gardening catalogue where designers know how to make hand coverings for serious green thumbs and fingers, she averts her eyes for just a few seconds so she will not act on what must simply be a natural violent impulse, focuses on a spot out in the street just behind Joyce’s head, and flops her mind into bed with her mother.

Martha Grace Olsson Gilford, known throughout Higgins
and parts from hell to high water as Marty, and at this point who knows what else. The Higgins poster woman for sex after seventy? The senior center seductress? The hot mama from High Street? The wild woman who produced four—count ’em—four daughters? The gray-haired grandma who gyrates with a lawyer on one side of her and a carpenter on the other? Mother, what now? Is this true? And isn’t the carpenter like sixty years old or something? And if you are doing it in that bed, with no shades or curtains on the window because of your obsessiveness with light, who else might know that your libido is still cracking like an adolescent whip?

Emma blinks once and imagines herself anywhere but standing in her own garden during the last Friday of March, which is royal early spring planting time, during the few free hours she manages to claim for herself each week when she is not working seventy-plus hours at her paying job, tying down the tent flaps of life so her way-too-extended, sometimes dysfunctional, and always beloved family doesn’t blow away, and agonizing over potentially damaging and terribly true Gilford family secrets.

And the looming Gilford Family Reunion.

The last Friday in March, which is an unbelievable one hundred and twenty-six days from the as yet totally unplanned Gilford Family Reunion. The last Friday in March, which makes Emma lean over as if a stomach cramp the size of Louisiana has just moved into her lower intestines while she calculates the number of extra hours she will now be spending with her apparently sex-crazed mother and two of her three older and occasionally certifiable sisters, Joy and Debra, who still live close enough to her so when she leaves her windows open Emma swears she can sometimes hear them barking like wild dogs at each other and their children and their silent spouses. The last Friday in March, when
occasionally overbearing but mostly sweet and surprisingly understanding Older Sister Number Two, Erika, who was smart enough to move away, will begin to call hourly to make certain the reunion plans include her specific and mostly trendy ideas—like last year when she wanted to have someone from the university come to talk about global warming. The last Friday in March, which would have been a lovely quiet day if her mother’s sexual affiliations were not being discussed by a woman who is actually crazy enough to be a member of the lively Gilford family.

At least, Emma consoles herself as the madwoman everyone calls Al—short for Ann Landers—stares at her, she can continue to distract herself and avoid the question on the answering machine and the man who left it.

Lively Al is looking impatient. She has dusted off her knees, wet her perfectly painted lips, and looks as if she is dying to reveal to Emma a set of sexual details that would prohibit Emma from ever being able to look into her mother’s eyes again.

“What an interesting question,” Emma manages to say. “Do you mind if I ask why you might think my mother is simultaneously sleeping with two men? Or any men at all?”

“People talk,” Al explains curtly.

“You would think in a town this size, where we all sort of know each other, that kissing and telling would be something you would not want to do,” Emma says, wishing she had erected a ten-foot-high brick wall
and
a locked security gate around her house five years ago when she bought it.

“My
mother
told?”

“Well, yes, you know how Marty gets when she has those afternoon cocktails over at the senior center.”

“I guess I don’t know how Marty gets at senior lunch hour.”

“Are you joking?”

“Joyce, you have known me my entire life. Have I at any moment ever struck you as a woman who would joke about afternoon drinking, a mess of whooped-up seniors who just shared a pork roast, or the sexual exploits of my own mother?”

Al actually has to think before she answers. She folds her hands as if she is praying and looks up towards the few remaining hours of the afternoon sky that Emma desperately needs so she can get the rest of the plants and flowers out of their containers and into the nurturing ground.

“Joyce?”

“Well, dear, to be honest what I know about you, honey, is that you work, spend lots and lots of time with your family—especially about this time of the year when you start with the reunion thing—you don’t seem to mind that you are single, and of course you have all those nieces and nephews instead of your
own
children, well, let’s see and oh, yes, you have created the most unusual and beautiful gardens in this part of the entire state of South Carolina…No, no, you would not be the kind of woman who would dance after lunch or sleep with two men at the same time. Or come to think of it, maybe dance at all.”

A Magnavox Satellite photograph of Emma Lauryn Gilford’s yard at this moment would be a blur of early spring color totally skewed by an implosion of emotional energy and a spoken revelation that takes the air out of Emma’s lungs and slams it towards the satellite faster than the speed of sound. Emma’s knees slant south. She can actually feel a thin line of sweat rolling from the far edges
of her lovely hairline and forming a track that looks like drops of tears on her yellowed T-shirt. She can also feel her face turn as white as Al’s hair roots.

“Listen …” Emma stammers, totally taken aback by what she knows deep in her heart is probably the truth. “Well, Joyce, it’s so good of you to stop by but I do need to get all these things planted before sunset …”

Al cuts her off as if she is a thoracic surgeon in the middle of a landmark throat-to-stomach operation.

“You haven’t answered my question, dear.”

“I can’t answer your question.” Emma wishes that a spring storm would magically arrive, strike the metal top of her garage roof, make Al pee in her pants and then run from the yard in embarrassment.

“Why?” Al demands, totally unaware of the storm Emma is imagining.

Emma knows that whatever she says will bounce through town like a terrified cat on the tail end of a hurricane. She knows that there is a ninety-nine point nine percent chance that what the loud and overbearing Joyce Maleny is telling her about her mother is true. She is equally almost certain that she will lose some of her bulbs and seedlings if she does not get their little bodies into the soil during the next twenty-four hours. She could easily throw back her head and laugh at the long-held dream that she latches onto when someone like Al shows up and exposes yet another family secret, that she—Emma—was adopted from a roving band of misplaced Southern Gypsies, because she definitely has nothing in common with her demented family. But Emma looks so much like her mother and her older sisters that it is impossible to imagine they did not come from the same bloodline.

Her sexpot mother, Emma realizes, could be going over the hundreds of pages of notes from past Gilford Family Reunions
right at this very moment so she can think up more work for Emma—unless, of course, Marty is too busy tap-dancing on the kitchen counter with a balding man in a Speedo.

If she thought for one more moment, Emma might also consider why the woman-who-knows-everything doesn’t think she—Emma—would dance after lunch, or give birth, or sleep around and not give a damn about who found out.

And then, just as she is wondering what she can say to get Al out of the middle of the very expensive Chinese Jack-in-the-pulpit oasis she is constructing against the side of her blue frame house, someone with similar facial features comes loping into the yard and rescues her in a way that could go down in Higgins history as one of the only times when the rumor-hungry Al was thrown off course.

It’s Stephanie.

Stephanie Gilford Manchester, all of sixteen, Emma’s oldest sister Joy’s daughter, is actually skipping into the yard and up the lovely red brick sidewalk in an outfit that would make a circus clown jealous and with a very obvious new face-piercing that totally, and to Emma’s immense delight, throws Al right off the sex boat and into the
“Oh my God what have you done to yourself now Miss Stephanie”
boat so fast it’s as if they’ve all been struck by a large barge and are about to sink.

“Auntie Emma,” Stephanie says, lunging for Emma as if she has not seen her every day of this entire week. “Look, look, look.”

Emma looks. And what she sees is a nose ring that could double for a towel holder in her kitchen. It is one of the largest nose rings Emma has ever seen in her life.

This on top of a green steel ring hanging from the edge of Stephanie’s left eyebrow, hair the color of the bright yellow daffodils that have already risen along the far edge of the backyard
border, a spider tattoo that is edging out from Stephanie’s right shoulder towards her lovely white throat, and her glorious purple leggings, denim miniskirt, a baggy peach sweater that Al immediately recognizes as a one-of-a-kind number that her best friend donated to the local Goodwill store just three days ago.

“Honey,” Emma says, holding her niece back to take a serious look at her and not caring if Al listens. “Who did this? Do you still have a fake ID?”

“Of course I still have a fake ID! Do you think Mom or Dad would let me do this? Don’t you love it?”

“Well, it’s definitely you, but it’s so … big. Couldn’t you have gotten one smaller?”

“Sure, but then it wouldn’t look like me. What do you think?” Stephanie asks, turning to face Al.

Al, thank heavens, is focusing on something else. She has drifted from Grandma’s sex life, the piercings, and the illegal way in which they were obtained, to the sweater.

“Where did you get the sweater?” Al wants to know.

“Goodwill,” Stephanie says, spinning in a circle so that she can show the sweater off. “Isn’t it cool? I’m sure it was some rich woman’s from the east side of town close to where you live, because it’s got a designer label.”

“It’s worth about two hundred dollars,” Al explains.

“Score!” Stephanie exclaims, offering to high-five Al.

Al does not want to high-five. She is looking from Stephanie to Emma and back again as if they are both criminally insane escapees
from the county holding pen just off the interstate. Who lets their daughter run around looking like a carnival applicant? Why isn’t Emma freaking out? What kind of family is this? Al turns to look at Emma and asks all those questions without saying a word.

“She’s not my daughter. Just my niece.” Emma shrugs, winking at Stephanie and wishing that somehow she were her daughter. Stephanie is a surge of energy that astounds her aunt every single time she sees her, which is very often.

And Stephanie for her part would love to permanently hibernate at her aunt’s house, which is totally not anything like her rambling and very noisy house a handful of blocks away. Her two brothers, her mother’s very big mouth, and her father’s love of country music have driven her to become a more than intrepid interloper at her aunt’s house.

Stephanie adores and worships her aunt so much that if Emma were to say, “No, you cannot come over,” Stephanie might very well fall into a devastated coma that would forever change her youthful view of the world and women and life and definitely, most certainly, for sure, her wacko family.